Product Description

Jimmy Bruno has played guitar with some of the all time greats, including Frank Sinatra, Barbara Streisand and Elvis Presley. He makes even the most daunting techniques accessible to anyone who wants to learn. Jimmy covers II/V/I progressions, changing chord colors, training hands and ears to work together, natural picking techniques, adding bass lines to chords and much more. No nonsense-just great jazz guitar! Languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34738 in DVD
• Brand: HotLicks
• Released on: 2005-11-15
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: French, German, Italian, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 120 minutes

Customer Reviews

The best jazz guitar instruction DVD on the market
The title says it all. Not for beginners or dabblers, but serious intermediate guitarists who want to improve their soloing, or people moving into jazz from rock/blues/whatever. Enough material to keep you busy practicing for a year. I've seen a bunch of jazz guitar instruction DVDs, and this is by far the best.

Jazz is meant to be played, not over analyzed with junk science jazz theory.
If I could only buy one jazz dvd this would be it. Jimmy may seem a little confident but he should be, he's kinda funny too when he says you can learn something the hard way and use the theoretically correct jargon if you want to "impress your girlfriend" LMAO

Here is a breakdown:

He shows you how to see the neck in multiple box and diagnal pictures for major, dorian, and melodic minor scales.

Shows the Major 7 and dorian arpeggios and how to connect them to these pictures.

Illustrates a Dorian melodic minor tritone substitution, sounds cool.

Shows his picking style.

Lays out a kick your ass chord lesson, I know more chords than any guitar player I know and this guy gave me a chord tooling.

Has a nice section on bass line chord comping.

Then he explains at the end how you should go about practicing these concepts with jam tracks.

And there are many examples he plays that are long and tabbed out; there are nearly a thousand riffs you could glean from these examples of his tabbed improvizations. He isnt teaching riffs but they are there tabbed out if you want them.

There is enough material here to keep you very busy and will go along way toward improving your ear and command of the guitar.

And best of all he makes it simple and takes the junk science out of jazz theory.

You should buy this. After your theory lessons.
This video is great for someone who knows how to play, but isn't very familiar with jazz style. There's enough information here for most players to get somehting out of it, but the video assumes that you know certian theory concepts. Unless you already know what scales are for, how to build them, how to spell chords and how to play a few closed jazz chord voicings, you will have to be very, very patient to really use this. If I were just starting out, I wouldn't get this as a susbstitute for a teacher. I would get a teacher and make them explain this to me when I was ready.

If you're fine with that, then there's plenty of good stuff here. Seriously, the video is two hours long. Even if you can't play anything near the scary fast speed he uses, you can still get the concept. It's all thoroughly explained in a clear, lucid manner. It's very nuts-and-bolts practical stuff, and you won't have to think about it for two hours to use it (but it couldn't hurt).

My only real gripe is that he can be kind of patronizing. I've met plenty of other guitarists who are just as pompous, and can't back it up as well as he can, so it doesn't bother me. When he suggests that you practice scales for "an hour a day to play for your friends at parties" it comes off as a little snotty. Still, he has plenty of good ideas, and he can play like nobody else.